I have also looked at the principe of several barges, one tug in a round-robin operation, but since ITB/ATBs was not available in S.E.Asia that option didn’t come up.
This was in the last major downturn in the early 1990’s and to produce a VERY marginal oil field in the Gulf of Thailand, (peak production 2000 Bbls/d and dropping quickly)
The beauty of this was that we did not use an FSO and could reduce the transportation capacity to suite te dropping production rate.
The idea was to use 3 X oil barges + 1 tug to receive and transport the oil to a refinery in Thailand. One barge always in the field, one at the refinery and one under way with the tug.
Unfortunately we were obliged to use a J/U under management as the production platform, so we got under bid by a company that offered cheaper production facility, which proved not to function except in dead flat calm.